At Momofuku Nishi, David Chang’s Magic Shows a Little Wear

Searching for money, for love and for food, we strike bargains. We may be content with one for years until we begin to be shadowed by the suspicion that the terms aren’t working out in our favor anymore.

That doubt nagged me at Momofuku Nishi, which the chef David Chang opened in Chelsea in January. Early in his career, with Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ssam Bar, Mr. Chang and his customers struck a deal that made decades of dining tradition look obsolete. He and his cooks could make Asian ingredients bend in new directions.

The cooking could be gloriously unwholesome or willfully esoteric or stunningly precise, but it was never quite like anything else out there. In return for tasting these new sensations, Mr. Chang’s customers gave up amenities that used to be automatic at restaurants hoping to be taken seriously.

When it comes to inflicting discomfort, Nishi still holds up its end of the bargain. You can make reservations, but not for a table, most of which are long and low; you’re likely to share yours with strangers. Instead, you reserve a chair, which, strictly speaking, is a seat built like a hard, flat crate.

Ssam Bar has similar seating, but the lighting is more seductive and the noise level is less throttling. At Nishi, highly sensitive microphones seem to be placed directly above all the loudest people, picking up and amplifying their every screech.

Mr. Chang told the Eater restaurant critic Ryan Sutton in March, when Nishi was two months old, that the acoustics “have to get better.” Reading that, I stayed away for six weeks, hoping for improvements. When I returned, the only obvious change was that more sound-dampening tiles had been affixed to the ceiling. If they helped, I couldn’t tell. In a phone interview, Mr. Chang told me he is “going crazy about the sound, but we are working actively to do the best we can.” Nishi is still as loud as the opening face-off of Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals.

Temporary soreness of the butt and throat were always potential downsides of a Momofuku meal. Back when we first agreed to the bargain, though, the food was so distractingly original and good that you wouldn’t have minded eating it while leaning up against a Dumpster in an alley sharing your chopsticks with GG Allin. At Nishi, you mind

The strongest dishes are exquisitely controlled plates of cold vegetables or protein that could easily fit into the lineup of a marathon menu at Momofuku Ko, the tasting counter where Nishi’s executive chef, Joshua Pinsky, cooked for more than five years.

Shavings of watermelon radishes and raw beef veined with white fat are sprinkled with ponzu-enhanced dashi and a Spanish olive oil that really stands out. Threads of celery curl around raw mackerel, given a breath of char and bathed in a soy analogue fermented from rye, with a precise flicker of yuzu. Sea scallops dusted with salted, dried kelp rise from a green juice that tastes like cucumbers, peppers and herbs — or maybe it’s just wheatgrass? These dishes and others like them are extraordinarily good because the ingredients are allowed to speak quietly.

But when the kitchen reaches for the throttle, the results can be muddled or muted.

Snails and anchovies seemed to be straining to keep a $55 prime rib from seeming ordinary and slightly dry. Where was the salted crust? Where was the invitation to give in to fleshy temptations held out by Ssam Bar’s rotisserie duck or its pork shoulder?

Mackerel was almost perfectly cooked, but nothing about it made me want to come back for more, not the lukewarm daikon hiding under it nor the barbecue sauce spread on top, a blend so complex and balanced it canceled itself out.

Allegedly, Nishi is Mr. Chang’s foray into Italy, although that’s not at all apparent until you dip into the noodles. The clams grand Lisboa is, I guess, a twist on spaghetti alle vongole. The fun of it is the way skinny chow mein noodles have been toasted before cooking, so you get some soft strands and some crackly ones in the same bite.

Footnotes, healthy food on the right side of the menu provide cryptic references to source materials. The one for the chitarra points toward the chef Mark Ladner’s pasta with crab meat and jalapeños. That dish is memorable. The Nishi version is not. Mr. Ladner’s bright clarity is replaced with a confusion of dried squid, XO sauce, fermented chiles and chile paste. One time it was spicy but too sweet; another time it was less sweet but not spicy enough.

The dish everybody talks about is called ceci e pepe, a takeoff on cacio e pepe made with chickpea hozon, a fermented paste made and sold in tiny amounts by Momofuku. Hozon does taste a bit like cheese, but not like the pecorino used in a classic cacio e pepe — it’s missing that wild pasture flavor of sheep’s milk. The dish is also missing a few degrees of heat; like some of the other noodles, ceci e pepe has a habit of arriving lukewarm.

A homage this far off the mark would be fine if the goal were to avoid animal fats, but butter slips around the strands of house-made bucatini. I don’t know why this dish exists, except to find a use for a proprietary Momofuku product.

Too much of the cooking at Nishi is self-referential, inward looking and so concerned with technique that you can’t help being conscious of it. In his early days, Mr. Chang served the kind of food chefs like to eat: intense, animalistic, O.K. with messiness, indifferent to prettiness. Nishi serves the kind of food chefs cook to impress one another.

As Mr. Chang’s operation has grown into a global concern with branches in Australia and Canada, his restaurants started to offer amenities that were once unimaginable. The cocktails at Nishi, like the margarita with an absinthe rinse, are clever in the right way. There is satisfying range on the wine list, too; the nuanced Farrside pinot noir from Australia is a far cry from the sparkling shiraz that was one of the only bottles Ssam Bar carried in its first year.

If dinner in Changland now includes intelligent drinking, why can’t it also encompass seating and acoustics that won’t leave your lower back in knots and your eardrums in shreds?

When we made our original deal with Momofuku, we were all kinds of swept away by the rush of flavors we had never encountered before. Now that Mr. Chang has a dozen years’ worth of protégés and copycats, now that he even seems to be copying himself, now that the rest of us have cooler heads and other options, it’s time to take another look at that bargain.